Shoplifting In The United States Is Out Of Control

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When I was growing up, shoplifting was something that was pretty rare. Once in a while, some irresponsible idiot would slip a candy bar into his pocket, but it wasn’t something retailers stressed out about.  Now everything has changed. 

The amount of retail “shrink” broke the 100 billion dollar barrier in 2022, and the final number for 2023 is expected to be even higher. Stuff is being stolen from our major retailers on an industrial scale, and this is having very serious consequences.

From coast to coast, retail locations are being permanently shut down because there is no end in sight to this insanity

This is particularly true in our largest urban areas. In San Francisco, a Macy’s store that had been open for 77 years is being closed down, and employees are claiming shoplifting was the primary factor behind the decision…

Employees at Macy’s flagship San Francisco store in Union Square have blamed its planned closure on shoplifting – despite mayor London Breed claiming crime was not a factor.

The Union Square store announced earlier this week it will be closing its doors after 77 years as part of a plan to close 150 locations across the nation over the next three years.

It isn’t just a few things that are going missing at that Macy’s store.

According to one employee, the men’s department is being systematically looted on a daily basis…

“It happens every day,” employee Steve Dalisay said. Hanging up blazers in the Macy’s sixth-floor men’s department, Dalisay said blazers, wallets and boxer briefs are the items most frequently stolen from his department. He said thieves take at least four blazers every day, adding that he typically sees about 10 wallets and 20 briefs stolen daily.

Another employee says that most of the shoplifting is being done by drug users and groups of teens…

“I’m not in charge of making the estimates of how much we lose in a day, but last year we were told the losses were in the millions,” the employee said. Shoplifters, he said, tend to be in two categories: drug users going after specific items for fences or teens entering the store in teams on brazen shoplifting blitzes.

“It’s a big thing,” he added. “What we have learned is a lot of drug users have deals with the fencers. They’ll give the drug users a list of stuff from the store, and they’ll go try to execute the list.”

Our national shoplifting crisis and our national drug crisis are very closely related. Drug users need to find money to fund their habits,. Shoplifting is one of the easiest ways to acquire items to sell.

At this moment, it would be difficult to overstate the severity of the drug crisis in the state of California.  According to Governor Gavin Newsom, authorities in only his state seized enough fentanyl last year “to potentially kill the global population nearly twice over”…

Roughly 62,000 pounds of fentanyl smuggled into California was confiscated by authorities in 2023. The total amount of the potent synthetic opioid seized last year “is enough to potentially kill the global population nearly twice over,” Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced Tuesday.

In 2023, the California National Guard supported other law enforcement agencies in counter-drug operations across the state, seizing a record 62,000 pounds of fentanyl at ports of entry, according to a news release from Newsom’s office.

That sure is a lot of fentanyl.

If you can believe it, the amount of fentanyl that was seized in the state in 2023 was more than 10 times greater than the amount that was seized in 2021…

Compared with just a few years ago, the amount of fentanyl seized by authorities has dramatically surged. In 2021, California authorities seized more than 5,300 pounds of the drug, with a street value of $64 million. In 2022 that rose to 28,000 pounds, with a street value of $230 million, based on the U.S. Department of Justice evaluation of illegal-drug values in the Los Angeles region.

We’ve never seen anything quite like this before. A lot of that fentanyl comes in from Mexico, but a lot of it also comes from China.The streets of California cities are flooded with addicts, and they are going to do whatever they have to do to feed their addictions.

This shoplifting trend is not going away or stopping anytime soon. At one hardware store in San Francisco, employees now accompany and escort customers through the store in a desperate attempt to reduce the level of shoplifting…

A longtime San Francisco business is trying something new to curb what it says has been “rampant shoplifting.”

Fredericksen’s Hardware and Paint in Cow Hollow is now offering a one-on-one shopping experience. The idea is to separate actual customers from those looking to steal from the store.

During certain hours, Fredericksen’s blocks off part of the store’s entrance and has people wait for an employee to help them instead of allowing people to just roam the store. The store’s longtime manager says it’s a move that was worth trying for the sake of the business, their employees and their customers.

I think that we will soon see many more retailers offer “one-on-one shopping experiences” to their customers.

Major retailers just can’t keep losing inventory like they have been. The amount of retail “shrink” in the United States has more than doubled in recent years, and it just continues to explode higher…

Shrink is the industry term for inventory loss often attributed to theft, damage, or errors. Once simply considered a cost of doing business, shrink resulted in retail profit losses exceeding a staggering $100 billion in 2022.

What’s more problematic, the trend of shrink appears to be far from reversing course, with losses more than doubling over the past five years. In an industry where margins and profitability are already under significant pressure, the rise in retail shrink is capturing the attention of all levels within retail organizations.

Sadly, there are some parts of the country where the looting of retailers has essentially become a way of life. In fact, this has even been happening in our nation’s capital…

A Washington D.C. CVS store is shutting its doors after being repeatedly ransacked by thieves, the chain has confirmed. The pharmacy, located in the Columbia Heights neighborhood, went viral last October when videos emerged of it totally stripped of all its products after being targeted by a teen gang.

Staff claim more than 45 schoolkids would go into the store and steal chips and drinks in the morning, after their classes and late at night. It will close on February 29.

Those kids wouldn’t have been able to loot that store multiple times per day if they had been put in prison the first time they did it. But our politicians don’t want such harsh laws. They want to coddle the criminals, and as a result much of the rest of the population is living in fear.

This is just another example of how degraded our society has become. The solutions to our national shoplifting epidemic are simple enough, but doubtful that we will see things turning around any time soon.